lates, whose strength it typifies, whose history it declares.

The earth is studded with monuments. From the earliest period of recorded time mankind has striven for a language more durable than words, in which human memories might be perpetuated. They have found it chiefly in the symbolism of monumental architecture. But for the employment of that language there must be sentiments to be transmitted worthy of its grandeur. In those lie the appeal to futurity, not in the medium of expression, however powerful or impressive. And therefore it is that the most imposing and venerable of such structures known to the world only stand silently over the grave of the dead past. They have no history to relate, no lesson to teach. Solitary relics of a race that is extinct, a civilization that has perished, institutions that have disappeared, cities and temples that have returned to the dust, to research and to imagination they are equally dumb. The desolation of the desert surrounds them. We regard them with wonder, but without instruction.

Not such the destiny of the memorial we dedicate here. Its grand silence shall be perpetually eloquent; its teaching shall never cease. It shall carry forward the history of those early days, of all that made Bennington heroic, and all that Bennington brought to pass. It shall tell the story not only of Stark and Warner, and Chittenden and Symonds, the Allens and the Fays and the Robinsons, and their compeers, but of that multitude of their humbler associates, less conspicuous, but just as devoted, who lived and who died for Vermont, whose names are only written

in the memory of God. The child shall learn from these stones the first instincts of patriotism. The wayfarer to whose ear our English tongue conveys no sense, shall not fail of their meaning. And all the dwellers upon the soil, as the years go on, shall be reminded and admonished what manner of man an American ought to be.

One final thought still presses upon us. We have recalled the past; what shall be the future? The gift of prophecy is mercifully withheld from man. Hope, kindlier than prophecy, stands in the place of it, the just and reasonable hope, instructed by what has gone before. The emotions of this day raise us far above the jargon and turmoil of the poor quarrel of the hour, whose outcome we are wont to await with so much solicitude, and which seem to our impatient vision to oppose to us obstacles so dangerous. We look down upon them, and we see how temporary and ephemeral they are. We perceive that we need not on their account despair of the Republic, which patriotism and devotion have more than once brought out resplendent from darker days than we shall ever know. Gazing forward, in the light of the afterglow of the dying century, we are able to discern with the eye of faith and of hope what this sentinel pile shall look out upon in the days that are before it.

It will look out upon Vermont-on whose valleys and hill-sides the seed-time and the harvest shall never fail. A land to which its people shall still cling with an affection not felt for the surface of the physical earth by any but those who are born among the hills; hallowed to them as to us by its noble traditions; sacred for the dead who rest in its bosom. The beautiful name

which the mountains have given it will abide upon the land forever. Vermont, always Vermont!

And it will behold a society where the great principles of civil and religious liberty on which it is founded shall be slowly but certainly working themselves out to their final maturity. A prosperity more and more widely diffused among common men. An advancing civilization, not without the vicissitudes, the blemishes, the mistakes, the sorrows, through which humanity's path must always lie, but in which the gain shall still surpass the loss, and the better surmount the worse; enlightened, from generation to generation, by an increasing intelligence, a broader knowledge, a higher morality; alleviated and illuminated, as it was in the beginning, by the inexhaustible blessing of our fathers' God.

II

ADDRESS

DELIVERED AT SARATOGA, NEW YORK, AUGUST 21, 1879

BEFORE THE AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION ON

CHIEF JUSTICE MARSHALL AND THE CONSTITUTIONAL LAW OF HIS TIME